THE SPEECH WE NEED TO HEAR

A Breadwinner Surge

Jay B Gaskill, Attorney at Law

My fellow Americans:

We are on a collision course with economic reality. The United States of America owes trillions of dollars more than it can pay back for a generation. There are two million fewer jobs[i] today than when the current administration took office. The puny annual growth rate in our gross domestic product is not enough even to generate paying jobs for the new workers that constantly show up hoping to enter our work force, let alone enough to make a dent in our desperate growing army of unemployed and underemployed.

The incumbent administration has led us into a trap. There aren’t enough rich people left to tax at the levels that could erase the current one trillion dollar annual deficit, let alone to begin payments on the national mortgage. The taxes needed to carry that load will depress economic activity and turn the current grim economic slump into a desperate and dispiriting new norm.

We can do better. We must do better.

We are underwater, just like a large family that is making mortgage payments with credit cards, trying to make it with one breadwinner who is working part time. Nothing this administration has tried has succeeded because the primary breadwinners in this country all work in the private, profit-making world. They support all the government workers, retirees, dependents and beneficiaries. But these primary breadwinners are a shrinking part of American life. They are the golden geese on which the welfare of everyone else depends. And their world, a realm where men and women work and create real goods and services that real customers using real money pay for, is being smothered.

Year to year, the political load on private, profit-making, job-creating commercial activity in the USA has become more and more suffocating.

Until now, you haven’t been told that truth. But there is good news. The American capacity for a strong business recovery, a breadwinner surge, has not yet been permanently crippled. It is still within our power to make and implement policy decisions at the national level that can and will allow a strong durable business recovery to take hold and flourish. Notice, I said allowed. Decrees belong to the dumpster bins of history – like the now fully discredited Chinese communist regime of the last century that declared a series of five year plans. “Boost farm production by 20% because we say so”, they decreed, and such decrees failed and failed and failed until the Chinese themselves turned to market capitalism.

Last year an American businessman had a private conversation with a high placed Chinese official. He complained about the difficulties and obstacles to doing business in the USA, especially under the current administration. The Chinese official joked, “How do you like living under communism?”[ii]

The political load on commerce in the USA can be lifted, but only by aggressive, enlightened new leadership, starting at a certain officeholder who lives on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC. We don’t need to go to the Wild West, safety-be-damned model that ignited the Chinese blowtorch economy. But we will need to aggressively peel back the massive web of regulations, permits, delays, impact reports, tariffs, business charges and impediments that collectively constitute a political load on profit-making business activity worthy of some third world kleptocracy.

Political and policy making power must be recaptured from the hordes of unelected regulators and bureaucrats who have choked off the stream of commerce like swamp plants, and that power must be returned to the elected people’s representatives, charged with a new spirit of restraint.[iii] The urgent task is to recreate a lean, clean and supple business-government relationship that is commerce-friendly and focusses only on major health and safety issues. Businesses need a level playing field that is at least as business-friendly as our overseas competitors, something closer to the kind that prevailed during the Reagan-era growth period. If this sounds like back to the future, it is because we have lost our way.

This country has world-class energy[iv] and agricultural resources, unequalled high-tech creative capacity and a hugely underutilized production and manufacturing potential. The great American recovery will start as soon we chose a new economic team in the White house. That new beginning can happen as soon as Inauguration Day, Sunday, January 20, 2013.

Are we ready yet?

JBG

First published on the Policy Think Site and the Dot 2 Dot Blog by Jay Gaskill

Forwards and links (especially to presidential candidates and their staff) are welcome and encouraged – with appropriate attribution. For everything else, contact the author at law@jaygaskill.com .